Luminosity

Poets have missed the boat

when it comes to light.

Married to its speed

& incandescence.

Its stars & twists of time.

Its trope for love & virtue.

Yet its preeminent

trait is silence.

Decipher the stealth of Sol:

its tiptoe in the woods

of recumbent colours; shushing the

white of winter; the green

of toadless lilies—

for splashing is for show-offs—

like the bro who’s sporting Ray-Bans

in the rain, revs his Mustang Sally

so the world will hear his coming.

Forgive my divagation.

My neighbour dons bikinis in the

gleam. The grass beneath her back

have bit their tongues.

Her summer tan will brown

without a peep, like the arachnid

in my houseplant or a girl

in Charlotte’s Web,

the one who’s forgot

her lines,

as if her gape and bulging eyes can

be enough, her parents too stunned to

gasp in the awkward hell—stuck in a

spider’s silk, when even susurrations

won't protrude from their cuspids’

den, while the spotlight’s flair to mute

is just a porker skulking off

with a goose’s egg,

miming his way to sunset

before the night has plunged &

wailed its indignation.

Andreas Gripp

August 8, 2026

photograph: shutterstock